28. Vinçon, BD and Mobles 114. 1972-1973

At the end of the 1950s the Amat family acquired the company Regalos Hugo Vinçon, founded in 1934 and housed in a large space on Passeig de Gràcia. Starting in 1967, it began a new phase based on innovation, not only with respect to the product catalogue, which branched out into the incipient industry of design objects for the contemporary house, but also with window dressings that extended beyond the purely commercial sphere, and with the production of a graphic language that was unprecedented at the time. For more than four decades, until it closed its doors in 2015, Vinçon was an inevitable point of reference, and even a stereotyped image, of Barcelona-based design. In 1973, Fernando Amat recovered a space within the store that had been, in the early the 20th century, the studio of the painter Ramón Casas. It marked the birth of the Sala Vinçon, which, especially in its early days and through 1983, became a meeting point for artists, designers, painters and photographers, an “institution before institutionalization”. The exhibitions, classes and workshops held there stirred the pot of the cultural landscape of late-Francoism in Barcelona.

BD was founded in 1972, when a group young architects who worked together under the name Studio PER – Pep Bonet, Cristian Cirici, Lluís Clotet, Óscar Tusquets and Mireia Riera, who had joined as an interior designer –  decided to create a company for the purpose of producing and selling furniture and objects for their architectural projects. Initially, they had ties to the famous Boccaccio nightclub and its promoter, Oriol Regás, who had also created a record label, Boccaccio Records, and a film production company, Boccaccio Films. Although it only lasted six months, Boccaccio Design, which would later become Barcelona Design (BD), presented some very daring proposals,  along with reissues of historical pieces by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Giuseppe Terragni, and designs by international figures like Álvaro Siza and Ettore Sottsass. From that time forward, BD became a benchmark company that has been able to work with the most outstanding designers over its 50 years of existence. 

Mobles 114 was created in 1973 by JM Massana, JM Tremoleda and Mariano Ferrer. The first two had previously founded the “Equip de disseny” [Design Team] in 1968 with Jordi Domènech and Francesc Miravitlles. The company began as a furniture store and interior design studio that produced the initial designs developed by its owners. They soon began a solid career producing pieces by other designers, including Carles Riart and, later, over the course of their career, Isamo Noguchi, Enzo Mari, Miguel Milá and Josep Torres Clavé, among many others.

A noteworthy precedent of these initiatives was Snark Design (1970), founded by Santiago Roqueta, which became the first producer of design furniture in Barcelona, and which was responsible for recovering and re-releasing pieces by Rietveld, Balla, Hoffmann and Dalí.